Subjects
Subjects
The building complex was built in Cagliari's historic Marina district. It is located on the sixteenth-century Bastion of “of the Dead” or “of Monserrato”, on the ancient walls of the district to protect the port area.
The building complex called “La Scala di Ferro” was one of the first hotels in Sardinia. Since the mid-nineteenth century, it was used by the National Guard as a Piazza d'Armi to become, in 1859, the Cerruti Bathing Establishment, equipped with twenty pools for baths, later thermal baths. The Biella engineer Antonio Cerrutti designed and built it at his own expense, to provide the city with public toilets.
The two crenellated, neo-Gothic towers date back to the year of their inauguration (1869), while at the end of the same century, the central interior was built, which overlooked a fantastic tree-lined garden, rich in antiquities and works of art. The hotel, at the hands of the restaurateur Luigi Caldanzano, opened its doors in October 1877 but ended up at auction sixteen years later, due to the debts accumulated by Cavalier Cerruti. Some time later, the engineer Fulgenzio Setti bought it, and introduced thermal waters into the bathhouse, restored the pools and restored the hotel facilities that, in the advertising prints of the early twentieth century, changed the name to “Castello Setti”.
In 1921, the hotel, which stood out for its luxurious rooms, welcomed the famous writer D.H. Lawrence who, accompanied by his wife on a long stay in Cagliari, rented a panoramic room on Viale Regina Margherita. Among the famous people who stayed in his rooms are the German historian Teodoro Mommsen (1877), Totò and Carlo Levi.
In 1961, the Italian company “Jolly Hotels” bought the entire complex and after undergoing a careful restoration, closed it a few years later. After long years of abandonment, which led to its degradation, the fate of the Hotel was decided on February 10, 1998, on the basis of the project presented by the current owner company that will build, in agreement with the City of Cagliari, the new headquarters of the Prefecture with an adjoining residence and underlying parking lots. In August 2000, amid heated controversy by Cagliari citizens and historians, work began to demolish the structures that destroyed or disfigured the central vancorpus with its elegant mullioned windows, friezes, wrought iron streetlights and sculptural decorations, which qualified the hotel among the most important neo-Gothic monuments in the Sardinian capital.
History of studies
A review of studies can be found in the bibliography relating to the fact sheet in the volume of the “History of Art in Sardinia” on nineteenth-century architecture (2001).
Bibliography by
F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the end of the 1900s. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, sheet 12.
Content type:
Civil architecture
Province: Cagliari
Common: Cagliari
Macro Territorial Area: South Sardinia
POSTAL CODE: 09124
Address: viale Regina Margherita, 46
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